The Domestic Geek Blog

When should I monetize my blog or website?

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monetize blog or website

A really common question is when should I monetize my blog? Do I need a certain amount of followers or page views before I can start making money?

The truth is, you should have started monetizing your website yesterday, here’s why and my favorite two ways to easily start out monetizing your website.

Ad Networks 

You might feel like you’ll be scaring people away, but in this day and age no one is going to leave your website because you have a couple ads in the sidebar. Can you think of a single website that you visited today that doesn’t have an ad somewhere on the page? I certainly can’t. Paid advertisements have become the norm, we either ignore them or click them, and you don’t want to miss out on money for those times that people will be clicking them.

As far as advertisements when you’re just starting out, my best advice would be to sign up for Google AdSense and once you know it’s up and running just ignore that it’s there. If you check that dashboard it’ll be pretty agonizing. AdSense has a $100 threshold, so you won’t get paid until you hit that mark. I’m going to be extremely honest, and it’s a bummer, but It took almost 2 years for me to make that first $100.

 After reading that, you might be feeling pretty discouraged. Let’s give a different scenario a shot, let’s say I had been blogging for a year and only making pennies on AdSense, then overnight a famous website shared my link and I had a post go viral. Let’s say I had 250,000 page views overnight and not a single way to make money off of that post. That scenario in my mind is so much more discouraging than having ads set up and only making pocket change each month.

As far as ad networks, I would recommend AdSense at first, they’ll approve you as long as you’re over the age of 18 and you’ve owned your website for 6 months (the official requirements and the application can be found here.)

Some other alternatives would be BlogHer publishing network if you’re a woman blogger, they’re pretty specific in who they’ll accept (I myself was rejected,) but it’s worth applying! Another network that I hope to work with is The Blogger Network,  they do require 80,000 page views a month, but they’ll also curate all of your ads for you, you’ll never have to do any work.

Affiliate Marketing

When you’re starting out there’s more than ad networks for monetizing your blog. I strongly recommend affiliates. Affiliate links are links that are added to posts. A great part of almost every affiliate program is that you just need to get your readers to your affiliate partners website, then you’ll make a commission on anything that they buy off of that website (even if it’s not the product you linked to.)

It’s important that you make sure to include proper disclosure, to let your audience know those links are making you money! That’s a whole different topic, just a quick (affiliate) before your link will work great.

I have two favorite affiliate programs, first off, I also absolutely love working with CJ.com (Affiliate by Conversant.) They have a ton of great retailers to work with (like my favorite ThinkGeek, psst, that is an affiliate link.) CJ.com is also extremely user friendly, the staff is seriously excellent, and they have great tools to use like collages, slideshow, and grid widgets that you can make with your favorite products. I promise anyone can understand and use CJ affiliates to benefit their blog.

If I can’t find it on CJ I use Amazon, because…well, Amazon is a huge search engine in itself and you can buy almost anything from Amazon. Often times I’ll direct my readers to Amazon and they’ll buy items that are completely unrelated, and I still make money off the sale.

While it’s fun to put together gift guides and other posts that focus solely on affiliate links, I also love adding affiliate links to organic posts and even old posts that generate a lot of traffic. There’s a misconception that affiliate links are “spammy,” but I completely disagree. I can’t count how many times I’ve clicked on affiliate links on other websites because I wanted to know where to buy that pretty pan they used or what that item from that craft project is, I’m not crafty so it’s nice to have visuals and the option to buy it right away. Affiliate links are great for everyone.

I hope that helps you understand how to start monetizing your website or blog! If you have any questions leave a comment below and I will respond as quickly as I can!

We also just revamped our weekly newsletters, sign up for great updates on improving your blog and you’ll even receive a FREE super simple blogger business plan worksheet to help you analyze your blog so you’ll be able to create a blog that you love and start making money! Sign up here

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Comments

  1. Great post. I don’t have nearly enough readership to merit getting ads. Even Google Adsense, I just moved my blog from Blogger to my own domain almost 3 weeks ago so I’ll have wait on that. Regardless, some great tips and advice and I’m bookmarking this to look at down the road.

    Thanks hun 🙂
    Lindsay
    http://www.theflynnigans.com

    • Unless you just created your website (rather than moved it) you should still be able to get AdSense right away. I would still recommend putting one up, maybe a banner in your footer or a little sidebar ad at the way bottom of your sidebar if you’re reluctant. I’d definitely recommend writing down your blog goals, as well as the ways that you plan on reaching them. That’s actually one of the questions on my “Super simple blogger business plan worksheet,” that I really think you could benefit from. It’s just a 4 page worksheet that you print off and fill out to really analyze what direction you want to go with your blog and how to implement that strategy. (I’m pretty proud of it, and can’t wait for people to use it as an awesome new resource for their blog.)

      You can find that worksheet here:

      Also, are you tracking your pageviews and readership via Google Analytics? You might be surprised at how many people pop by from sources such as Google or Pinterest, even if you don’t have a lot of subscribers or people coming back and commenting on your page. We all start somewhere, good luck with your blog!

      • Well when I say “moved”, I created my own domain and imported my blogger posts and then ran from there… So I think that still qualifies as new…

        Right now, well for the last three weeks, on top of trying to figure out design/themes and bloody WordPress, I keep a notebook with me of ideas, I have a calendar that I’ve mapped out what I know for sure I want to regularly post about, etc.

        Thanks for the link. I tried clicking on it last night and it went nowhere. And just trying it again, I don’t know what’s wrong with it but when I enter my name and email and click on, register now it does nothing, nada…… If I can download it, I’ll for sure print it off and no doubt find it useful, I’m sure of it. Let me know if you can figure out what I’m doing wrong or what’s up with the link, please and thank you. 🙂

        I am tracking page views for sure through a widget in WordPress called Jetpack and it actually has some pretty detailed stats and info there so I think I’m good there.

        I think I’ll also sit down really soon to make a Facebook page – another good way to post blog posts. There’s just not enough time in the day!! lol I need more hours or less sleep, one of the two.

        Thanks for all the great advice and tips, I appreciate it so much! 🙂
        Lindsay
        http://www.theflynnigans.com

        • Oh no, you can’t use stats through JetPack, they’re basically just an estimate, brands will not accept those stats and you won’t benefit from skewed stats either. You should get set up with Google Analytics as soon as you can.

          Definitely get a Facebook page set up, it’s actually really simple. As a blogger it’s easier to have all of the social media accounts, but only truly focus on one or two, so make sure you at least have Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook, and then see which one you want to excel with.

          Blogging can definitely be a full-time job, it’s definitely my full-time job!

  2. Thank you for this post! I recently just started monetizing my blog, and I’m still really confused about the affiliate programs. Not so much how they work on the blog, but I went to Amazon’s affiliate page, and I have no idea what I’m looking at or what to do! I’m figuring it out slowly. Thanks!

    • Ok, I totally hear you, and I put together a couple really simple walk through videos on affiliate marketing. Check back here tomorrow morning for a video that will walk you through each step of Amazon affiliates.

    • Check back here tomorrow for videos and tips on affiliate marketing! You ladies inspired me to make some walk through videos that make the whole process a lot easier. Thank you so much for the comment, it helps a ton to know what you need to know!

  4. 4 stars
    My programmer is trying to convince me to move to .net
    from PHP. I have always disliked the idea because of the costs.
    But he’s tryiong none the less. I’ve been using Movable-type
    on numerous websites for about a year and am concerned about switching to another platform.
    I have heard good things about blogengine.net. Is there a way I can transfer all my wordpress posts
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